Okay, I am not endorsing the cartoon above, that’s not how you lead your life. I am going to tell you what you’d hear a lot in your first year orientation but will never realize the importance of it until you reach a point where I am right now. This is how I felt on Monday evening,

when I started to realize the impact of the lost time at the NAWMBA conference on my modestly organized school work deliverables for the following week.

Things you’d hear in your orientation are

– Don’t try to be a control freak

– Try to be on the edge and learn to be comfortable in being a little uncomfortable

– Know that you cannot be THE BEST in everything but be happy to put in YOUR BEST

Well, for me

– I was a control freak, still am to an extent

– I am on the edge and still learning to be comfortable in it

– I am trying to do something different, may not be every day but at least at the frequency that keeps me uncomfortable

Being a control freak doesn’t mean that you boss around other people. It also implies that you are highly organized, that a day’s slip out wracks your nerves. I am that person. After coming back from NAWMBA (where I had an awesome experience), I had a lot of things to catch up on and just one Sunday wasn’t enough. I freaked out. I played along being utterly uncomfortable in running late on a couple of assignments’ self-imposed deadlines, my unkempt room, back log on many readings etc., until I could no longer take the fact that there were still things in ‘pending’ status. I had to take a mental time-out, which I did. Watched some TV for the first time after coming to the US, spoke to a senior, took a step back and prioritized my work.

I cut out on the ‘white noise’ – a noise containing all of the audible frequencies of vibration, that tuning in to a particular frequency becomes difficult i.e., I started to concentrate more on what was in hand than worrying about the thousand other things that needed my attention. I tuned in to one frequency at a time.

I cut down ‘dead air’-a term used in the radio world for unproductive time. I looked at different ways to maximize my work, for e.g. reading easy-read materials during my travel, working in groups more often and combining my cooking and reading

There are so many organizations that are active at the same time and the fact that you cannot be doing everything that’s there, calls for your better judgment on what you REALLY want to do. There is no place like an active MBA course such that of Fisher’s to learn the art of knowing your passion and prioritizing your available options accordingly.

The satisfaction that I am putting in my best has opened new hours in a day that never existed before.